10.31.11
More on Occupy darwinism
Occupy Darwinism: http://darwiniana.com/2011/10/29/occupy-darwinism/
The left needs a new perspective on modernity, science, evolution, religion, and much more. That is an impossible task, but the attempt must be made.
We have tried here to debunk the ideology of Darwinism, and its shotgun marriage with economic ideology, with a warning that if you call something science, people will act on that basis: the myth that economic competition, with the rich as the evolutionary winners and the poor as the evolutionary losers, has produced the bashing of the welfare state, renewed class war, and the rest of it, down to the Wall Street hybris in motion of Social Darwinist sabotage of the economy.
Hard to believe, but the whole theory of Darwin here is bilge. In fact, it is an impostor created for just this kind of economic boondoogle.
The simple answer is that this theory is false, and springs, not just from the views of Hebert Spencer, often used to ‘save’ Darwin, but from the Man himself, Darwin and his theory (which may have been Wallace’s theory).
It is important to see that the problem is with the theory of natural selection, one that, taken as an abstraction, tends to suggest a course of action to those who wish to apply biological reasoning to social conflict. It is all hogwash. The theory of natural selection has a complicated basis in the false reasoning of scientists, but in the end it is a strange case of very smart people becoming very stupid in the pursuit of scientism. Look at the strange allergy to altruism in this sector of science, and the attempt to derive a substitute mechanization
in the tricky-dick mathematics of population genetics, a tactic that silences most critics, forced to say ‘duh’ confronted with the math, apparently hard science. The reality that a stage of higher muddle far far away from real science escapes the ‘science groupies’. The sad fact is that a pecular brand of capitalist idee fixe, at work since Adam Smith (and before, as in the fable of the bees, Mandeville), has done a master override on biological theory and the result is a world-historical screw-up that will some day soon sink the Titanic of Big Science. Not the same as ‘science’, which, as yet, has no theory of evolution that is really workable.
I think the OWS, and/or a larger group around it in the sense of philosopy/theory/social ideology, should take on Darwinism to attack Social Darwinism at its roots, and be done with the fancy footwork that has ‘saved the paradigm’ by blaming Herbert Spencer. The problem is with the pseudo-science of natural selection. Time to be done with it.
There is a simple solution to the public understanding of evolution. Read any book on human evolution: they actually follow it in practice, usually, staying well away, most of the time, from natural selection preaching, because they know all too well they can’t show its reality in human evolution. Frequently, discussion does in fact veer off into Darwin’s thinking, but many writers are cagey to simple depict the chronicle of human evolution as a set of facts about the fossil record. That’s it, the exciting drama of the mystery of evolution, and of man in particular, an epic saga, whose dynamic is, as a matter of fact, still unknown to us.
Without the theory of Darwin critics of Social Darwinism can achieve a real public breakthrough here, and challenge the ideological Vampires using this theory in the background to distort economic conditions.
The study of the eonic effect (throw out the term itself, if you like) suggests that a devastating limit on evolutionary theory is the case: unless you have continuous data in real time, or, at least, at the level of centuries, the reality of high-speed ‘real’ evolution at work is invisible. Which means we haven’t the foggiest about how evolution produced the forms we see. The solution is to do what we are already doing: stick with chronicles of evolutionary fact, like historical chronicles, wary of the abuse of theory used beyond observation to create an ideology of evolution, which can in turn be applied to history as a reductive legitimation of economic or class war tactics.
The eonic effect raises the issue of speciation: it did NOT occur because a higher class of apes prevailed over a lower one. In fact, speciation was a species level macroevolutionary process that must have computed whole populations on a global scale. The primitive nonsense of Darwinian logic is thus undermined at the base, as the higher apes on Wall Street discover they are the real dodos.
Joseph said,
November 1, 2011 at 6:36 am
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/economy-a-budget/187645-social-darwinism-prevails
Joseph said,
November 1, 2011 at 6:36 am
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/henry-schoenberger/occupy-wall-street_b_1006984.html
Darwiniana » Repost: Occupy darwinism said,
November 7, 2011 at 12:51 pm
[...] http://darwiniana.com/2011/10/31/more-on-occupy-darwinism/ [...]